Microsoft suffered a stunning defeat on Monday when a European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that the US software giant illegally abused its market power to crush competitors. The European Union's second-highest court dismissed the company's appeal on all substantive points of the 2004 antitrustruling. The court said Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, was unjustified in tying new applications to its Windows operating system in a way that harmed consumer choice. The verdict, which may be appealed only on points of law and not of fact, could force Microsoft to change its business practices.

Yet with other alternatives, I can uninstall the equivalents of notepad, fonts, directX, icons.

NTFS is a partition file format so that's really outside the scope of "bundled applications" since it is an essencial part of the NT OS unlike notepad, IE and WMP which are user space programs not truly essential to booting the NT kernel and reading a drive.

But there again, I can choose from over 30 different partition file formats including fat16, fat32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, RieserFS. Still, with winNT, I can use fat32 or NTFS partitions but in reality the functions provided by NTFS are still essential to a properly functioning and secure winNT. I include this last bit as more of a comparison demonstrating the limitation of Windows and flexability of it's alternatives.